by Nikki Schiavone

1. Subject Lines – You never get a second chance to make a first impression. A subject line is one of the first opportunities to WOW your subscribers. Use this opportunity to be creative, a bit avant garde, descriptive, authentic, and honest. Want to know more about improving your subject lines?
2. Opt-in Forms – Opt-in forms gather a subscriber’s personal contact information. It’s important to place opt-in forms on prominent areas of your website for optimal list growth. Opt-in forms should affirm the type of email communications that will be sent and disclose how email addresses will be used.
3. Deliverability & Reputation – Work with a professional email service provider that uses a stable infrastructure (like Publicaster). Send your email to organically opted-in email lists with a consistent mailing strategy for improved email deliverability. Evaluate your performance, test your campaigns, optimize your content and subject lines. Bottom line, improve your deliverability and your reputation will follow suit.
4. Template Designs – Your email template is a direct reflection of your website, your brand, and the personality of your company. If your template looks stale, outdated, and uninteresting, how does that make your brand look? Now is as good a time as ever to put an end to stale templates and create fresh, new-and-improved templates. In doing so, you’ll improve click-through rates, deliverability, retention, and ROI.
5. SWYN – Time to pull out the big guns, marketers! It’s now easier than ever to increase your reach by cross-pollinating both email AND social. Share With Your Network (SWYN) allows email subscribers to easily share email content with their friends, colleagues, and family on various social networks – all with the click of a button. SWYN allows for your subscribers to be an extension of your marketing team. It builds a social community for your brand you never knew was there. 
6. Call to Actions – BUY. CALL. CLICK. READ. OPEN. LISTEN. WATCH. Give your subscribers something do with the emails you send. Make it clear why you are sending emails and what specifically you want them to do when it hits their inbox. Be explicit – again, make it easy. Need some ideas on how to keep it fresh for 2010?
7. Organic List Growth – Save the trees, use email, grow it organically, and remember quality beats quantity any day of the week. Send a welcome email after subscribers opt-in, customize your content based on subscriber preferences, and give your subscribers what they want. Check out what Support Director Melanie Sims has to say about organic list growth the right way. Build your list before the sale, attend events, host events, don’t be afraid to use the phone, complement your email marketing communications with other marketing communications.
8. Frequency – It’s important to be smart with the amount of emails you send. Overwhelming subscribers with content typically doesn’t work and results in lower open percentages over time. Be realistic and transparent about the expectations of your email program. In the end your subscribers will appreciate it, leading to happier clients and more conversions. 
9. Content – Having a great product or service to market is fabulous, but actually being able to tell its story is something different. Great content is what your subscribers are looking for. Test out the layout of your content, change up your authors, do some research on industry trends, educate yourself with what your subscribers want, study buying habits, study engagement habits, and try to change things up. The best problem to have is TOO MUCH content; you can always take some away.
10. TEST! – Email is an art not a science. It is imperative that email marketers allot a significant amount of time to create test lists to test content and campaigns. I recommend using an email marketing tool that offers automated testing within the application, like A/B split testing. A/B split testing allows for marketers to select the best possible message to send subscribers. By testing the content, from address, subject line, images/copy, placement, call-to-actions, and layout, you’ll improve your subscriber engagement, conversion rates, and ROI.

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